Ethereum Glamsterdam fork targets 78.6% fee cut as Sepolia date set

Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork activates on Sepolia September 28, targeting a 78.6% cut in Layer-1 gas fees and 10,000 TPS. The date, confirmed in the minutes of All Core Devs Consensus call #185 on August 20, marks the first concrete milestone for the upgrade since developers launched Devnet-8 on August 13.

"Since there has been a big change in the block building process, third-party block builders should test their infrastructure against the new protocol specifications starting now," Kristin Kim, founder of Protocol Watch, said.

The upgrade bundles three EIPs. EIP-7928 introduces parallel execution to push throughput to 10,000 TPS. EIP-7904 reprices gas to cut Layer-1 fees by roughly 78.6%. EIP-7732 implements Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, targeting a 70% reduction in MEV extraction. Developers also confirmed a block gas limit increase from 60 million to 200 million, with EIP-8261 proposed to raise the limit automatically in stages after the fork.

ETH trades near $2,400, up 3.13%, with RSI at 86.13 — firmly overbought. Google Gemini AI projects a mid-case target of $4,150 by late 2026 if the fork delivers. A delay past Q4 could send ETH below $2,100, with a bear target at $1,850.

Sepolia Date Holds Conditions

The September 28 date is provisional. The ACDC minutes note the decision was deferred to the next call on September 3, and six client teams — Lodestar, ethrex, Lighthouse, Nethermind, Teku, and Prysm — confirmed the epoch without dissent. Lido and Optimism both requested testing windows on a stable DevNet ahead of activation, with Lido's Dima Gusakov saying he would prefer both testnet dates pushed back by about a week.

The Hoodi testnet fork is set for October 26 at 17:42:48 UTC, contingent on stable DevNets. No mainnet date has been set. Earlier projections of a November 4 mainnet fork no longer hold, as that would place it only nine days after Hoodi — unusually tight for Ethereum's standard testnet-to-mainnet gap.

DevNet 8 experienced non-finality six hours before the August 20 call, caused by a caching bug affecting builder deposits at the fork transition. Three consensus clients — Lighthouse, Prysm, and Teku — were affected. Lodestar optimized deposit pre-processing to cut fork transition time from about 20 seconds to roughly 500 milliseconds.

Hegotá Selection Begins

While Glamsterdam heads to testnets, the selection for the follow-on upgrade Hegotá has started. EIP-833, fixing an off-by-one error in checkpoint root calculation, and EIP-8379, making the consensus client the sole sync source, are provisionally scheduled. EIP-7610 was cancelled from Glamsterdam, superseded by EIP-8253 targeting Hegotá.

Two proposals face sharp community disagreement: EIP-8363, which dynamically burns issuance rewards, and EIP-8141, which would let user accounts validate transactions via smart contract logic. Layer-2 projects Base and Offchain Labs oppose EIP-8141, with Base proposing EIP-8130 as an alternative. Client teams must publish priority assessments by mid-September.

Separately, Bitcoin Hyper has raised over $33 million in presale to build an execution environment on Bitcoin using the Solana Virtual Machine, offering yields up to 36% APY with a planned 2026 launch. The project targets high-speed transactions and smart contract functionality for Bitcoin's ecosystem.

The Glamsterdam fork represents a structural shift in what Ethereum's mainnet can handle. If the fee reduction and throughput gains materialize as specified, the range of applications that can run profitably on Layer 1 widens considerably — a direct challenge to the Layer-2 scaling narrative that has dominated Ethereum's roadmap since The Merge. The September 3 ACDC call will determine whether the Sepolia date holds.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.